Why tags matter in your content marketing efforts

If you’re like many businesses, content is an important part of your marketing efforts. Whether you’re uploading blog posts to your own company website or sharing your latest infographic with your social media followers, you likely put considerable thought into each effort.

If you use a CMS like WordPress, you’ve likely been prompted to assign tags to your content. Tags go back to the early days of HTML, when site designers used them to capture the attention of search algorithms. As those algorithms grew more sophisticated, though, they learned to gather information from the text on the page itself, seemingly rendering tags obsolete. However, tags are as relevant as ever. Here are a few reasons you should make tags an important part of your content creation efforts.

Improve Search Rankings

One of the most important tags is the title tag for your page, which is usually generated from the title you give the page. Your title tag usually shows in the page tab, chosen by you when you title your blog. As you choose the title for a new blog post or subpage of your site, make sure you consider the words customers would use that would lead them to your content. The more keywords you can match, the more likely your page will be seen ahead of your competition’s.

In addition to the tags you enter in your CMS, you may also have the opportunity to enter a meta description. This is the content that will be displayed in search results under your page name, so it’s important to make it compelling. You should also ensure your target keywords are included in the description, since this can impact search rankings.

Increase Views

Tags are often used to make it easy for readers to find other content related to a specific topic. If your blog focuses on improving SEO, for instance, your blog post on link building could be tagged to direct customers to all of the other posts that have been tagged with that same keyword. This means the content you work hard to create won’t only be seen once, but numerous times, by people who are specifically interested in that topic.

However, it’s important to use tags wisely to avoid spreading your content too thin. Learn to write to those tags, which will build the number of posts readers will see when they click over to read more about that topic. You should also limit the number of tags you assign to each post to a few. Having dozens of tags will only confuse readers, making it more likely they’ll choose to click on none of them. Don’t feel pressured to use more than one tag per post. There is no minimum.

Track Customer Behavior

Today’s tags go beyond identifying similar content. Marketers are using them to assign values to specific customers, then track those customers’ behaviors. Marketing automation software, like GetResponse’s new marketing automation tool make it easy to assign tags to each customer, then use those tags to conduct marketing activities. When a marketer launches a new campaign, customers can be segmented by their assigned tags, making it easier to send messages to those who are most likely to find them relevant.

Tags can also be worked into marketing workflows, with specific actions designated to go to those customers in a database who have certain tags. An office supply retailer, for instance, could set an email newsletter to go out featuring a sale on copy paper to customers who have “printing” as a tag. This speaks to the personalized marketing that so many customers now expect, allowing businesses to create targeted messages with minimal time investment. Businesses with large customer bases can use API to automate the tagging process, making it easy to get an actionable database in production within a matter of days.

Conclusion

As you build blog posts, knowing the difference tagging can make can help you create more effective tags. Once you’ve perfected the art of creating highly effective tags on your own blog, you’ll be able to transfer what you’ve learned to other areas, including your marketing databases. When done correctly, tagging can be a great way to group topics and customers, giving you the data you need to ensure you’re reaching the right people with your messages.

About the Author

Dan Steiner is an entrepreneur, Internet-marketing expert and author from San Luis Obispo, Calif. He currently serves as Co-Founder and CEO of Elite Legal Marketing, a company offering law firm web design and SEO for lawyers. He has been published in a number of media outlets, including HuffingtonPost, Inc and Yahoo, among many others.